| Among
Washington insiders, rumors have circulated for years about
a secret conservative plan to crush liberal opposition and
assume full control of American politics. In the late 1960s,
according to legend, a handful of young conservatives calling
themselves “The Famous Five” came up with the
key ideas and the overall strategy of such a plan, won support
for it from powerful corporate interests, and set in motion
the train of events that has led to the election of Ronald
Reagan, the advent of a Republican majority in the House of
Representatives, and the triumphs of George W. Bush.
Until now, “The Plan” has been merely a rumor.
In the late 1980s, young conservatives spent hours reverently
speculating about it over drinks at “The Sign of the
Indian King” on M Street, while across town frustrated
young liberals in the think tanks around Dupont Circle darkly
attributed every conservative victory to this mythic document.
By the mid-1990s, the myth started
to fade as each succeeding triumph of the conservative movement
made it increasingly improbable that any group, however brilliant,
could have planed the whole campaign. Eventually people referred
to “The Plan” as one might refer to the Ark or
to the gunman on the grassy knoll: intriguing but fantastical.
Indeed, the very idea of such
a plan probably would have evaporated from political consciousness
had not the Board of Directors of the National Enterprise
Initiative commissioned a distinguished American historian
to write an informal history of that organization for the
35th anniversary of its founding. Two years later, and for
reasons we may never fully understand, the historian and the
Board fell into bitter dispute. The Board paid the historian
the advance stipulated in their contractual agreement and
severed all relations with him.
Subsequently, and by means I
may not divulge, a draft of the historian’s book, titled
“The Plan”: How Five Young Patriots Engineered
the Rescue of America, found its way into my hands, along
with interview transcripts, official correspondence, and related
documentary materials. The excerpts from his materials that
follow put before the public for the first time undisputable
proof of the existence of “The Plan” and tell
the remarkable story of the conservative capture of American
culture and politics. (For reasons which will become sufficiently
obvious, if they are not already, the names of all personages
in this account, including the name of the historian, have
been changed.)
A more complete version of “The
Plan,” with my more extensive notes and annotations,
will be published next year.
--Editor
1.
How the History Came to Be Written
This letter from Ross Wallace Forbes to Professor Henry Bloom
outlines the agreement between Bloom and the National Enterprise
Initiative (NEI). – Editor
12 September 2000
Dear
Prof. Bloom:
I just want to thank you personally for taking on this project
for NEI. I know I speak for all of us here when I say that
we are truly honored to have a historian of your stature “on
board.”
As you know, the history you write will be absolutely confidential;
no one other than a board member will receive a copy. For
this very reason, we hope you will find writing it enjoyable:
an insider’s account aimed specifically for other insiders
should liberate you from the more oppressive strictures of
conventional historiography. We encourage you to give us a
story that is lively as well as insightful, amusing as well
as authoritative. Above all, we expect a celebratory history
– since we are, after all, commissioning this history
as part of our 35th-Anniversary celebrations.
I have instructed our archivist to put NEI’s entire
collection at your disposal. I have also encouraged all senior
staff, as well as the other four members of the so-called
“famous five,” to make themselves available for
interviews. I hope you will let me know if you encounter any
difficulties in this regard.
I look forward to reading your first draft in January of next
year. Meanwhile, with appreciation for your efforts and trust
in your discretion, I am
Yours truly,
Ross Wallace Forbes III
Chairman of the Board
Ps.
Our celebration will include a black-tie dinner at the White
House, to which you are already most cordially invited. And
do let me know if your son decides to apply to Princeton,
my alma mater.
2.
The Original Jest: Interview with Mark Hopkins
According
to Professor Bloom, this interview about the birth of The
Plan was conducted in the lobby of the Park Regency Hotel,
in New York, in March 2001. Bloom notes that Mr. Mark Hopkins
was 56 at the time, “a tall man with gray hair combed
straight back.” A member of “The Famous Five*,”
he was in town to attend several board meetings. Bloom comments:
“An impressive guy with an uncanny resemblance to Gary
Cooper.” - Editor
How did it all begin? With a jest - at Sophie Sidgwick’s
dinner party. Her family’s house on Louisburg Square,
Beacon Hill. Winter of 1969. A sixties thing, you might say.
Sophie’s parties were always grand affairs, and naughty,
too. (Parents down in Palm Springs, you know.) Fires crackling
cozily in the fireplaces, people laughing and drinking. Lots
of bare shoulders and expensive evening dresses, the bitter
smell of martinis, the music of Lester Lannon pouring smoothly
from the ballroom.
But the party ended early. A Nor’easter swept in –
big fat flakes flying against the windows. Everyone fled to
Concord and Weston before the roads got too slick. Then there
were just the five of us sitting around the fireplace, pulling
the cork out of another bottle of Petrus ’47 Sophie
had brought up from her father’s cellar.
We were griping once again about the radicals we had known
in college. What motivated them. Where they wanted to take
the country. There they were on the cover of Time magazine.
Traitors to their class and country. It was nauseating.
“What we need in the next decade,” said Sophie,
“is a real revolution.”
I asked her what she meant.
“I mean a revolution by us. A revolution of the rich.”
We laughed.
“Power to the plutocrats,” murmured Russ Conwell.
But we started playing with the idea. Sophie went down to
the cellar and brought up another bottle of the Petrus. Lots
of laughs, and one by one the major ideas came out. Wealth
tolerance. Alliances. Intellectual infrastructure. It was
all just a game. No one took it seriously.
But a few days later we got that first memo from Larry Eucher.
On paper, in the light of day, it looked interesting. Like
a plan. And remember: the five of us had money to spend.
____________
*The Famous Five got their name from the series of mystery
books by Enid Blyton, which were read to young Sophie Sidgwick
by her English nanny. The five were: Ross Wallace Forbes III,
Mark Hopkins, Russell Conwell, Sophia Sidgwick, and Lawrence
Eucher. - Editor
3.
The First Draft of the Preamble to “The Plan”
The
NEI archives date this document “May 1969.” It
and all other excerpts of “The Plan” are taken
from early drafts in the NEI’s archives, and therefore
they all deal with aspects of the plan that have already been
accomplished. The final version is so secret that, despite
the promise of ‘complete cooperation’ extended
by Forbes, Professor Bloom was never permitted to view it.
In a handwritten note that accompanied the manuscript, Professor
Bloom speculates that “The Plan” is in fact continuously
updated, and that the NEI is understandably reluctant to allow
any outsider to glimpse its plans for the future. - Editor
The objective of this plan is to secure for America’s
wealthiest families their basic rights of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness – rights that have been systematically
dismantled by government and increasingly disrespected since
1932.
The plan has four fundamental insights:
1.
The rights of the wealthy can never be secure so long as Americans
repose confidence in their government: the very idea of government
of the people, by the people, and for the people is intrinsically
inimical to wealth tolerance. Wealth will naturally promote
envy, envy will inevitably seek redress through politics,
and in this country politics will necessarily take the form
of a government hostile to the rights and interests of wealth
accumulation.
2. The core political weakness of wealth is that over time
it becomes concentrated in ever fewer hands and thus steadily
shrinks its own political base. The only way to offset this
weakness is to establish and control a durable alliance with
a group whose demographic strength seems likely to grow or
at least remain constant.
3. The creation of such an alliance must be based on the identification
of deeply held American values that are perceived to be threatened
by the very presence of government in American life. For it
goes without saying that a lasting alliance between concentrated
wealth on the one hand, and a group of more ordinary Americans
on the other, cannot be forged on the basis of common interests:
the essential interest of wealth accumulation is to aggregate
wealth and not to disperse it, so over time the enrichment
of the few will necessarily come at the expense of the many.
4. Therefore, an alliance must be built upon values that transcend
pecuniary and practical interests, and specifically on values
that are intrinsically resistant to the encroachments of a
government “by the people.” In America, and indeed
wherever there are nations, there will always be dynamic conflict
between the highly abstract concept of “the people”
and the much more concrete actualities of particular communities
scattered across the country. This is the conflict we must
do all in our power to promote. Hence, Eucher’s First
Law:
“From
distrust of “the people” springs fear of the people’s
government.”*
4. Whose Jest? Excerpt from the Interview with Charlie White
Excerpted from Bloom’s November 2000 interview with
Russell Conwell in his room at the Victory Hotel in Hue, Vietnam,
where he was representing the Carlyle Group in negotiations
with the Vietnamese Government. Bloom’s notes read:
“Unbearably hot and humid day, broken air-conditioner,
fan turning slowly overhead. Russell Conwell sits sweating
in his underwear in an armchair under a portrait of Ho Chi
Minh. His delivery is manic, but his mind is razor-sharp.”
- Editor
You’ve already talked with the others, right, so you
already know about the party at Sophie’s – and
the snowstorm and the Petrus and the jokes? Right, I guess
you could call that the semi-official version. Isn’t
it amazing how quickly young Turks become stuffed shirts?
Yeah, there was a storm, but the reason we all stayed so late
was that we all had the hots for Sophie’s narrow waist
and mischievous blue eyes, and we stayed up all night hoping
to be the last one awake with her. Boys will be boys, and
we were all boys except Lawrence, who was just twenty-seven
himself, and already he took himself so seriously, already
sculpting himself into the brilliant Nobel-prize winning economist,
and that’s how he hoped to get her, you know, get Sophie:
he was one of those very smart guys who are stupid enough
to think that the pretty girl will fall for him instead of
the jock with the cleft jaw and the hairy chest. I should
know. I was one of those guys myself.
So I’m going to climb out on a limb and guess that no
one told you about the thai sticks that brought out the deeply
mellowed tannins of the Petrus, am I right? And I’m
also going to guess that you’ve come away with the impression
that Sophie and Lawrence were the ringleaders, the ones who
really came up with the whole idea. And that Russell was just
the class clown, the court jester? But I thought the whole
thing began with a jest, isn’t that right? Isn’t
that the semi-official version? And isn’t kind of strange
that on this one occasion the court jester himself isn’t
really responsible for the jest? Doesn’t that strike
you as a wee bit strange?
5.
Making Contact: The Origins of the Alliance
Transcript of Bloom’s June 2000 interview with Mark
Hopkins. - Editor
After we read Lawrence’s memo, we met again several
times to revise it and come up with some compelling language.
Then we hired a part-time staffer. We realized that we needed
some kind of official institutional status, so we started
looking around for a group to join or a university to affiliate
with. Nothing. Nada. That’s how dead the conservative
movement was in 1969.
So while Wallace Forbes, who was a lawyer, started incorporating
us as a 501-c3 non-profit, we decided that one of us should
fly south and try to meet with some influential Christian
conservatives. I was elected – I guess because I’ve
always been more of a jock than an intellectual. We figured
I would be less threatening than the others.
I flew down to Birmingham and talked to some people there.
At that time, you have to remember, there was still no such
thing as the Christian Coalition. From Texas to Georgia the
south was dotted with powerfully charismatic ministers, but
they had no organization at all. They hated what they saw
America becoming in the 1960s, but they had no interest in
politics per se. In fact, they saw politics as corrupt. They
just wanted to be left alone to do their own work.
I made my way back and forth across the Bible Belt, and eventually
through some contacts in George Wallace’s organization
I met the right guy. A minister with vision. In Lynchburg,
Virginia, of all places.
I’ll never forget the night we met. He had invited me
to his home for dinner, and when I got there the whole house
smelled of roasting ham and apple pie. Before sitting down
to supper we gathered in the living room for prayer. His words
were simple and heartfelt.
After supper, we retired to his study and went to work. More
clearly than I, he saw that the Democrats were destroying
themselves. He saw that the times were ripe for a conservative
renewal. And he got our idea of an alliance instantly. I didn’t
go into the whole issue of wealth tolerance with him, but
I did say that a significant number of very wealthy Americans
were disturbed about the direction our great country was headed
in. Our numbers were small, but our resources were great.
We needed to join with people whose resources were small,
but whose numbers were great.
He pulled a bottle of Old Weller out of his desk drawer and
poured me a glass - in those days he didn’t touch liquor
himself – and we got right down to brass tacks.. On
a piece of paper he wrote a short list and shoved it across
the desk for me. These were his issues:
1. A righteous Christian nation.
2. Racial purity.
3. Women in their rightful place.
4. No Jews.
Hard-hitting, to be sure, but I saw some things we could work
together on.
I took the pencil and wrote my own list next to his:
1.
A righteous Christian nation: Prayer in public schools.
2. Racial purity: Our tax dollars should support separate
Christian schools.
3. Women in their rightful place: Fight against birth control
and abortion.
4. No Jews: The time isn’t right yet.
We argued for a while about my response to his fourth issue,
but eventually I led him into the light. When he asked me
what we wanted in return, it was my turn to write on the pad
of paper. I wrote the five words we had decided on back in
Boston:
Get
government off our backs!
“That’s
the message?” he asked.
“That’s the message.”
“And now we organize?”
“Now we organize. From the grassroots up to the White
House. Just like the other side.”
He seized my hand. “Amen, brother. Halleluiah.”
I wrote out a check for fifty thousand dollars – big
money in those days – and put it in his hand. I had
absolute faith in him. I could see he was a man of his word
and a man of vision. And I was right. Of course, that was
before he got into all that trouble with the prostitutes and
stuff.
6. The Plan (19 September 1970)
Bloom’s collection of materials includes two identical
versions of this earliest-known draft of “The Plan.”
One (NEI Archives Document SS 091970:001) is attributed to
Sophie Sidgwick. The other is a copy of a telegram sent to
Sidgwick’s Louisburg Square address from the Hotel La
Farge in Kyoto and signed by Russell Conwell. - Editor
Dear Ones: Now that we know who our “allies” are,
it’s time to draft a plan. I submit the following for
your consideration. Hugs and kisses!
Phase One: Foundation
1. Create a political and cultural alliance between free-market
advocates of wealth tolerance and conservative Christian advocates
of a moral America. The common enemy is government, which
is as threatening to the rights of wealth creators as it is
hostile to the beliefs of Christian Americans.
2.
Create the National Enterprise Initiative as the instrument
through which we launch a sustained intellectual attack on
government. NEI will award grants to promising young scholars
whose published work will be crucial to Phase Two. They will
target the following critical issues:
-
the case against government (e.g., analysis of the failure
of federal programs such as the war on poverty.)
- the case for white racial superiority (e.g., analysis of
IQ test scores, arguments for European cultural and scientific
superiority, etc.)
- the case for religion in the public sphere (e.g. new interpretations
of the Founding Fathers’ views, studies demonstrating
educational excellence of Christian schools, systematic intellectual
critique of the separation of church and state.
- the case for the invisible hand of the free market to take
the place of government and perform all government roles more
efficiently and less expensively.
3. Create a coalition of conservative Christian congregations
that will advocate strenuously against government intrusion
in their lives and government hostility to their beliefs.
They will target the following critical “wedge”
issues:
-
the case against unfair governmental policies that give preferential
treatment to “minorities” – for example,
affirmative action.
- the case against immoral expansion of women’s “rights”
– for example, so-called abortion rights.
- the case against government protections of free speech that
promotes permissiveness and immorality – for example,
pornography.
7.
The Doctrine of “The Clean Little War”
Several historians have attributed NEI’s doctrine of
“the clean little war” to Francis Fukuyama. The
truth, how ever, is that Mark Hopkins came up with the idea
shortly after reading Sidgwick’s memo.
Hopkins and his family were vacationing in Santa Lucia.
“One morning I woke up early and went for a long walk
along the beach. Everything was so calm, so serene –
it got me to thinking about peace. When I got back to our
bungalow, I just sat down and wrote the damn thing.”
- Editor
Dear Sophie:
Brilliant
memo – but I foresee a slight problem – that we
might become victims of our own success. Once our allies on
the Christian Right have achieved their goals, what’s
to stop them from noticing that we have a lot more money and
then turning on us?
Somehow, we must find a way to predictably distract Americans
from the increasing consolidation of wealth. I propose what
I have somewhat vainly called “The Doctrine of the Clean
Little War.” (See below.)
The
Doctrine of the Clean Little War
War
can be calamitous, but peace is catastrophic. War can destroy
nations, but peace ineluctably saps them of their vigor. War
can call upon a people to make great sacrifices, including
the temporary sacrifice of their right to wealth; but a sustained
peace offers dangerous respite to the poor and middle classes
who, looking about them and reflecting upon what they see,
start to feel sharp pangs of wealth envy and begin clamoring
against so-called “wealth inequality.” No one
wishes for war, yet sustained peace is by far the greater
threat to wealth tolerance.
But if conflict is preferable to peace, how does one promote
war without risking national catastrophe? How does one harvest
the benefits of war without incurring the political costs
of war? Above all, how does one ensure that the patriotic
fervor and national unity generated by war do not give rise
to heated calls for greater sacrifices of personal wealth?
The answer I propose is a doctrine of the little war. Every
administration favorable to wealth tolerance must seek out
opportunities to wage low-risk and low-cost wars against small
targets of opportunity. These wars should be commenced no
later than the second year of each new administration and
must be concluded by the end of the third so as to allow the
victorious, wealth-tolerant president the full glory of his
military triumph in the upcoming elections.
Given this tight timetable,
a specific research mission for the NEI must be to compile
a list of available targets, along with plausible justifications
for war against them. These can be made available to each
incoming administration. In compiling this list, we must give
priority to wars that would strengthen NEI’s own strategic
objectives – that is, to wars that that are congruent
with the cultural war our allies are fighting here on American
soil.
7. The First List of Opportunity Targets
Attributed by the NEI archivist to Sophie Sidgwick, this list
is handwritten on the back of a copy of Hopkins’s memo.
NEI Archives Document SSundated0179). - Editor
1.
Any Central American nation. Full congruence with NEI strategic
alliances. War here could be portrayed as anti-Communist (Che,
Fidel) and as “front line” in war against drugs
and illegal aliens (all of them Catholics!)
2. Any small, resource-poor African nation (e.g., Somalia,
Ethiopia, Liberia, Camaroon, etc.). Congruences: front line
in war against epidemic diseases associated with licentious
behavior – not to mention useful resonances between
African “savagery” and inner-city cultural pathologies.
3. Any Arab nation except Saudia Arabia and Kuwait (too many
resources) and Egypt (too many people). Arabs are perceived
as virulently anti-Christian, so any war in this region is
essentially a religious war and is therefore fully congruent
with our overall strategic objectives. Moreover, since Arabs
are also perceived as anti-Jewish, war in this region undercuts
liberal coalitions hostile to wealth tolerance.
8.
Phase Two: Consolidation
This document appears to be a continuation of “Phase
One” (above) and is treated accordingly by the NEI Archives.
However, see Prof. Bloom’s doubts about “Phase
Three” (below). - Editor
1.
The case against government through the politicization of
conservative Christians should make possible the election
of a president whose campaign is based on hostility toward
government.
2. That president will begin to appoint justices and judges
who can draw on the work of NEI scholars to interpret American
law as hostile to government and favorable to Christian beliefs.
3. Using new economic theory and data generated by NEI scholars,
the president will dramatically cut taxes, thereby eliminating
many government programs.
4. The erosion of the tax base, coupled with NEI scholars’
expose of the intellectual prejudices and financial inefficiencies
of public schools and universities, will inaugurate the dismantling
of public education.
5. The crumbling of public higher education will lead to soaring
costs for private higher education which will pressure the
liberal professoriate to espouse wealth tolerance instead
of radical ‘60s ideologies.
6. The writing of new textbooks with favorable views of wealth
tolerance will restore truth to American history.
9.
The Privatization of the Pentagon
Ross Wallace Forbes’s memo of August 7, 1998, NEI Archives
Document RWF 070898: 009.
We know more certainly today than we did thirty years ago
that faith in the unrestricted play of the free market is
the surest guarantor of global wealth tolerance. The re-design
of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, along
with the passage of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization
virtually assure the triumph of free-market principles throughout
the world. We should congratulate ourselves on these achievements,
which had their origins, as I recall, in Lawrence’s
memo of 4/12/85, Charlie’s somewhat intoxicated speech
at Lutece on New Year’s 1991, and Walter’s 1992
speech at the Hoover Institute, “Global Harmony: Wealth
Tolerance and Free World Trade.”
But why stop here? If privatization
of government is our means of effectively ending government,
why stop with such successes as we have had – the privatization
of the postal service and the privatization of public education?
I propose nothing less than
the complete privatization of the Defense Department, which
should eventually become a private corporation. McDonnell-Douglass
would be good candidates for assuming this role, but the five
if us might want to get in on the ground floor with a completely
new entity. Our contacts in the financial markets could easily
leverage the capital we would need for successful start-up.
We might call the company “Defending America, Inc.”
or something of that sort. This firm would be awarded a long-term
contract to manage all United States defense planning, procurement,
and operations. Halliburton is already ideally positioned
to take on this role, so “Defending America” might
have to merge with it. (I have taken the liberty of sounding
Cheney out on these matters, and while he remains annoyingly
sphinx-like, I get the impression that he is favorably disposed.)
Let me know what you think.
I have a meeting with my friends at Goldman-Sachs next week.
10. Placating the Alliance
Lawrence Eucher became a professor of Economics at the University
of Chicago in 1972 and won the Nobel Prize in 1984. He was
the first Director of Research at NEI (from 1977 to 1995),
and more than any other member of the Famous Five he was responsible
for mapping their intellectual strategy. This internal memo
sent to the other four members of the Five is dated 27 February
1994 and is catalogued in the NEI archives as Document LE
022794:003. - Editor
Now that we have successfully legitimated Christian schools,
weakened the public education system, taken on Hollywood immorality,
discredited the intellectual capabilities of Black Americans,
and rolled back so called abortion “rights,” our
allies have begun to press us on the last remaining issue
in our informal contract: “the Jewish question.”
To complicate matters, many Jews in America are no longer
card-carrying New Dealers and
civil rights advocates. Indeed, by taking a hardline position
on issues pertaining to Israel, we have made great strides
in freeing some important Jewish Americans from the grip of
liberal wealth intolerance. Moreover, some crucial elements
in our intellectual architecture have been contributed by
Jewish intellectuals.
Daniel Deronda, one our most
promising research Fellows, has been working on this thorny
problem for some time, and I am pleased to report that he
has found a solution – which we should immediately share
with the leadership of our allies. Immersing himself in the
more obscure aspects of evangelical belief, he has discovered
hitherto overlooked verses in Revelations that call for the
“destruction of Israel” as a condition of the
second coming of Christ. He has proposed that we urge the
evangelical ministry to put this prophecy smack in the middle
of evangelical theology – indeed, to make it the very
foundation of their dogma.
Why? Because that way we can
all play both sides of the fence. We can maintain and even
strengthen our support for Israeli hardliners and at the same
time justify this policy to our allies by explaining that
without the state of Israel in existence, there can be no
divine destruction of Israel; and that without such destruction,
there can be no Second Coming.
In short, by a deft twist of hermeneutics, “pro-Israel”
can appear to our allies as “anti-Jewish.” Pretty
damn clever, n’est-ce pas? If you all agree, I would
like to nominate Dan for our Silver Medal.
11. The Privatization of the IRS
Sophie Sedwick’s e-mail of August 13, 2000. NEI Archives
Document SS071398:077. – Editor
Thanks to Rumsfeld’s reforms (based on NEI research
and advocacy), our privatization of the Pentagon has made
considerable progress. Now we might consider a further step:
the privatization of the IRS through the establishment of
a for-profit tax-collection entity called “The Great
American Harvest, Inc.”
There is ample precedent for
such a change: as you know, throughout most of European history,
tax collection has been placed firmly in private hands. The
Great American Harvest would be governed by highly remunerated
executives directors who would naturally take to heart the
cause of wealth tolerance. (Think of Grasso and the Big Board.)
Privatization would also allow powerfully regressive tax policies
to be backed up by more effective compliance enforcement.
Our privatization of Medicare
is the basic model here. Start small by enacting legislation
that allows Great American Harvest to get a foot in the door.
Then slowly, through a process of cost efficiencies such as
so-called “cherry-picking,” render public-sector
tax collection obsolete.
12.
The Great American Harvest – Ross Wallace Forbes’s
Reply.
Fantastic idea, Sophie! You’re so damnably clever. Here’s
my little footnote to your brilliant proposal:
.
Great American Harvest’s tax system could be reformed
following the model of “pollution credits” established
in 1985.
- Wealthy individuals would be permitted to “buy”
their annual tax burden with a “voucher” consisting
of the “free labor” of the unemployed.
- These unemployed would be maintained in special camps established
by American Penal Systems, Inc.
- Persons or entities failing to meet their annual tax payment
would be consigned to serve in these camps for specified periods
of time – depending on the level of their indebtedness.
Anyway, these are just some thoughts. We can kick them around
over lunch some time soon. Cheers all,
-- Wally
13.
Privatization of the Electoral System
Russell Conwell’s e-mail of August 14, 1998. Sent privately
to Bloom by White on October 12, 2002. - Editor
I have to say (again!) that I’m a little tired of you
guys taking my ideas and claiming them as your own. Wally
–you and I talked about privatizing the Pentagon last
fall. You plied me with daiquiris and let me babble on, but
I saw you taking notes in the little notebook of yours. And
Sophie, you little whore, you sucked the idea of a private
IRS out of me last New Year’s – remember?
But I’m not the kind of
guy who holds grudges. And to show it, let me to toss to you
– as veritable pearls before swine – the idea
that we simply privatize the entire electoral system. The
Supreme Court has already affirmed that “money”
is “speech.” Speech is an expression of intentions
and desires. So is a vote. Therefore votes are a kind of speech,
and therefore money can be the embodiment of a vote.
Radical as it might seem, this
plan simply takes he current system of financing election
campaigns and makes it more efficient. Instead of contributing
to a candidate’s campaign and then voting, people would
perform both operations simultaneously. The campaign contribution
would actually be the vote. The larger the contribution, the
greater the vote.
But “contribution” is the wrong word. Each vote
would actually be a payment -- an investment in the common
stock of an entity to be called “Free America, Inc.,”
which would become the holding company encompassing both “Defending
America, Inc.” and “The American Harvest, Inc.”
I have a meeting at Morgan Bank
next week to discuss precisely this matter – an IPO
for “Free America.” If you all want to get in
on this ground floor, I’d be happy to send you the exact
time and place of the meeting.
Poisoned kisses,
Russell
14. Phase Three: Domination
Like
“Phase One” and “Phase Two” this document
is dated May 1969 by the NEI Archives. Nonetheless, certain
inconsistencies prompted Professor Bloom to speculate that
the document is actually of later date – “perhaps
as late as October 2001” – so we treat it here
as the most recent phase of NEI’s plan. A penciled marginal
notation in Sidgwick’s handwriting reads: “This
should do the trick – for our grandchildren’s
grandchildren.” - Editor
1.
Election of Republican majorities in the House and Senate,
combined with control of the Supreme Court and the appellate
courts, will make possible:
a.
unlimited contributions to election campaigns, thus permanently
ensuring American wealth tolerance
b. constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion
c. constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage
d. constitutional amendment prohibiting all forms of wealth
intolerance
e. destruction of liberal intellectual establishment through
(a) control of all media outlets by advocates of wealth tolerance
and (b) elimination of public education at all levels
f. establishment of nationwide, for-profit Christian education
system
g. privatization of all branches of government
h. constitutional amendment allowing inheritance of U.S. Senate
seats
Editor’s Note: Of course, I have contacted the NEI and
asked them to verify or deny the authenticity of Bloom’s
account. Robert Flack, their official spokesperson, denies
that the organization ever commissioned a self-history or
had any association of any kind with Professor Bloom. Readers
seeking more information about NEI are directed to its website:
www.ourwealth.org
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